Eating raw is simply consuming foods that are not heated. It is eating food as nature intended: naturally grown, naturally harvested, unprocessed. Raw diets are catching on because the benefits are understood, although not touted on your local news. And big business doesn't want us to know that the healthiest foods are essentially untouched, that is, not processed under heat or with chemicals, additives and preservatives.

You don't have to be 100% raw to feel good about it. Experiment, read books, try recipes, learn from others.

In nature all animals eat living foods as yielded up by Nature. Only humans cook their foods and only humans suffer widespread sicknesses and ailments. Those humans who eat mostly living foods are more alert, think clearer, sharper and more logically and become more active. Best of all, live food eaters become virtually sickness-free!

Cooking is a process of food destruction from the moment heat is applied to the foodstuff. Long before dry ashes results, food values are totally destroyed.

If you put your hand just for a moment into boiling water or on a hot stove, that should forever persuade you just how destructive heat is. Food is usually subjected to these destructive temperatures for perhaps half an hour or more. What was living substance becomes totally dead very rapidly with exposure to heat!

Cooking renders food toxic! The toxicity of the deranged debris of cooking is confirmed by the doubling and tripling of white blood cells after eating a cooked food meal. The white blood cells are the first line of defense and are, collectively, popularly called "the immune system."

As confirmed by hundreds of researches cited in the prestigious National Academy of Science's National Research Council's book, "Diet, Nutrition and Cancer," all cooking quickly generates mutagens and carcinogens in foods.

Proteins begin coagulating and deaminating at temperatures commonly applied in cooking, and are devoid of nutritive value.

Vitamins are rather quickly destroyed by cooking.

Minerals quickly lose their organic context and are returned to their native state as they occur in soil, sea water and rocks, metals and so on. In such a state they are unusable and the body often shunts them aside where they may combine with saturated fats and cholesterol in the circulatory system, thus clogging it up with cement-like plaque.

Heated fats are especially damaging because they are altered to form acroleins, free radicals and other mutagens and carcinogens as confirmed in, "Diet, Nutrition and Cancer."

Thus you can see that dead foods make dull, diseased and sooner dead people.

Why Raw Foods?

1. Raw foods are better quality, therefore you eat less to satisfy your nutritional needs. The heat of cooking depletes vitamins, damages proteins and fats, and destroys enzymes which benefit digestion. As your percentage of raw foods increases you feel satisfied and have more energy on smaller meals because raw food has the best balance of water, nutrients, and fiber to meet your body's needs.
2. Raw foods have more flavor than cooked foods so there is no need to add salt, sugar, spices, or other condiments that can irritate your digestion system or over stimulate other organs.
3. Eating a diet of raw foods can reverse or stop the advance of many chronic diseases, including heart disease and cancer. Remember, cooking creates free radicals, which are the major cause of cancer. When you lower the number of free radicals your cells are bombarded with, you lower your risk of cancer.
4. A raw food diet can protect you from acute diseases such as colds, flu, measles, etc. Raw foods maintain a healthy body and a healthy body will not become diseased.
5. As long as you combine raw food properly according to the rules of Natural Hygiene, you will soon reach a level where you no longer suffer from heartburn, gas, indigestion or constipation.
6. It is environmentally sound. With humanity on a diet of raw foods, the food industry would close up shop and take up organic gardening. This would save us enormous amounts of natural resources used to produce power for these industries. Nuclear power would be clearly unnecessary. And think of how many trees and oil reserves could be saved without the need for the paper and plastics used in packaging our processed foods. There would also be less carbon dioxide released in to the atmosphere when all the cooking stopped and more oxygen produced from all the new orchards and gardens, thus helping to reverse the Greenhouse Effect.
7. Eating raw saves you money on food, vitamins, pots and pans, appliances, doctor bills, drugs, and health insurance.